


Friday's Child

by Lisse



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Meta, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-05
Updated: 2008-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-22 21:59:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/243008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lisse/pseuds/Lisse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Renesmee Cullen is in love with many things, but immortality isn't one of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Friday's Child

Friday's Child

* * *

  
When Renesmee Carlie Cullen is sixteen years old - or at least her equivalent of sixteen - she decides to cut her hair.

The rest of the family only finds out about this when she comes marching down the stairs in what she chooses to think is a dazzling cloud of curls, but which in fact looks like a flock of distressed baby ducklings have taken up residence on her head.

(Auntie Alice helps her undo most of the damage later, although not before taking enough photographs to blackmail her for the rest of her long, long life.)

* * *

The so-called Hair Phase, as her mother refers to it with a strained sort of patience, is followed by the Juggling Phase (Grandma Esme confiscates the good china), the Salsa Dancing Phase, the Wakeboarding Phase, the Serious Literature Student Phase (Grandpa Carlisle confiscates the Shakespeare) and the much-dreaded Mechanic Phase. (Her father hauls out her mother's old truck in a well-meaning but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to keep her away from his cars.)

It's not until she hits the Human Phase - when she starts wondering about the other half of her heritage - that her parents begin to realize these might not be the half-vampire equivalent of growing pains.

* * *

She doesn't like her name until people at college start boggling when she introduces herself. After that she takes a sort of fierce pride in it.

* * *

She lives and breathes numbers and equations and science. Left to her own devices, she will absorb physics and chemistry and biology and mechanical engineering - to the extent that Auntie Rosalie asks her to please stop sharing her thoughts on the Planck constant every time she accidentally touches someone.

It takes her two tries to get into MIT, because she insists on doing it the same way humans do, standardized tests and all.

* * *

The first ordinary person she ever lives with is her freshman roommate, who's from Georgia and listens to bad techno and throws around cultural references the way (most) other people breathe.

("Where the hell did you grow up?" the roommate asks one day, when the third _Simpsons_ citation sails merrily over her head. "A cave?"

She looks up from her textbook and hears herself say, "Yeah, maybe I did.")

* * *

She loves her parents with all her heart.

But when she talks about how wonderful humans are, how they get sunburns and don't break things quite so much and don't accidentally share their thoughts - when her mother looks at her as if she's sprouted wings - she realizes that they will never ever understand each other.

* * *

The Human Phase doesn't end so much as make room for the Biology Phase, when she puts her own blood sample under a microscope and takes notes in neat, meticulous handwriting.

Her parents - her whole family, really - would probably tell her that some things are beyond all scientific understanding, and maybe she shouldn't look too closely into the impossibilities of her own existence.

She wonders if there's a cure for something that defies known science; she wonders if her having a choice about whether or not she wants to live forever would be such a bad thing after all.

* * *

She knows her mother and father expect her to marry Uncle Jake. Sometimes they bring it up in their roundabout way, at which point she thinks that maybe that's why she formed her weird mystical werewolf bond with him: so she'd have _one_ parent with something resembling common sense.

(Uncle Jake thinks of her as his beloved daughter and shamelessly spoils her and teaches her how to tinker with her mother's armored Mercedes, which pretty much endears him to her forever.)

* * *

When she's her own personal equivalent of twenty-two, she slings a backpack over her shoulder and goes exploring - slow like the glaciers she learned about from her first science books, human-slow, with her thoughts closed up tight and her hands in her jacket pocket and numbers and science and the building-blocks of her existence dancing in her head.

She hitchhikes and eats at horrible diners and reads the trashier sort of paperback romance on the bus and goes on awkward first dates and occasionally answers her cell phone - she's fine, Mom, just passing through the world.

When no one's around to see, she tilts her head up and shades her eyes, too-short hair falling across her forehead, and steps into the sunlight.

* * *

She knows all about her mother and father's love story.

Secretly, she thinks it's kind of cute.

(Very secretly, she thinks they have nothing on how much she loves being part of the world.)


End file.
